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Since its arrival at the red planet in December 2003, imagery of ESA's Mars Express mission enjoys great popularity, with the High Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC) onboard the spacecraft, which is operated by the German Aerospace Center (Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt; DLR), playing a major role. Since January 2004, ESA, DLR and Freie Universität Berlin continuously and jointly publish still and moving high-resolution images of Mars' surface.##markend##

As of today, something is different with those regular images releases: as a joint undertaking by all three partners, Mars Express HRSC images will be published under a Creative Commons licence. The licence we apply is the same one used for Rosetta NAVCAM images: CC BY-SA IGO 3.0, with Attribution to ESA/DLR/FU Berlin. In practical terms it looks like this:

Credit: ESA/DLR/FU Berlin, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO.

In this image, acquired by the HRSC camera, we can see a partially ice-covered landscape in the Promethei Planum region on Mars at the end of the southern winter.

We will also apply the licence to all HRSC images released to date – but as with Rosetta NAVCAM images, please be aware that it may take us a while to go back and change the credit lines for all of those images on our various online platforms.

While CC was implemented as the standard licencing policy at DLR in 2012 , and ESA just recently began licencing content under Creative Commons (CC) licences, there is a novelty: it is the first time that three public organisations in Europe team up in licensing joint content under Creative Commons.

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Elke Heinemann has been an editor for the DLR web portal since 2003. She has been responsible for the developmen of special sites for missions, such as the Rosetta mission, the International Space Station and Mars Express, for the web portal.
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